I first made friends with Jack over the phone. It was 1992,
and I was editing and publishing (with David Om, who also passed away two years
ago) the Visual News, a monthly newsletter devoted to the programming language
Prograph. Jack was a Prograph user and enthusiast, and submitted articles for
publication. I often had occasion to talk with him about editing changes and
the like. Since he was living in North Carolina and I was in California, and
this was before the days of the pervasive internet, we talked on the phone. I
started to notice that these conversations tended to last for a couple of
hours, and ranged far beyond the editing questions that occasioned them. I
honestly do not remember what we talked about at the start, just that I found
it very hard to break off a conversation. This has been such a pattern in my
life with a number of my friends that I have a name for it: conversational
Velcro. I have found that with such people it is no use waiting for a natural
break in the conversation to end it; there are no such breaks. Jack was so
interesting, so intelligent, so wide-ranging in his interests and knowledge
that the only way to end a conversation was simply to announce that I had to go
to sleep now. Even then there will always be one last topic that we just have
to talk about. This exact thing happened the last time I talked with Jack, a
few days before he died. What we had was a twenty-year dialog punctuated by
breaks necessitated by the rest of our lives.

The first time that we met in person was around two years
into our friendship. I had been teaching Prograph, and organizing the Prograph
User Group that met at Apple in Cupertino every month. I was approached at one
of these meetings by Doug Smith of Perkin Elmer Advanced Biosystems. Doug
helped invent the machines that were used for gene sequencing, and they were finding
the quantity of data involved was overwhelming their primitive data handling
capabilities. (I believe they were using Excel at the time!) He was putting
together a programming team to put together a custom-built solution, and saw
the benefits in doing it in Prograph. He hired me to teach his team Prograph.
After the course he asked me if I would be interested in being lead programmer
for the project. I said that I did not have anywhere near the kinds of skills
needed for such a large undertaking, but that I knew exactly the person for the
job. A week later I picked Jack up from San Francisco airport for his
interview. I must admit that I was quite shocked at how young he looked. Given
the level of conversation we had enjoyed I had given no thought to the fact
that Jack was the same age as my son! This quickly passed and we fell quickly
into an even richer version of our familiar interaction.

Long story short, Jack got the job (Doug Smith was smart
enough to look beyond his youth) and moved to California. This was a major
turning point in his life, and I am proud and happy that I was able to have a
hand in it. Others are much more qualified than I to speak of his work at
Perkin Elmer, but I do know that Doug Smith expressed his fervent gratitude to
me on more than one occasion for introducing them.

After Jack was forced by ill-health to leave Perkin Elmer,
he was unable because of his disability to take paying work. He therefore
embarked on the project that consumed his time and energy until the day he died,
the revival and popularization of Prograph. Again, I am not qualified to make
any judgments about his work, but I did listen to him talking about the project
for many hours, and I was in awe of his ability to conceptualize complex
systems and manipulate them in his mind. Implementing a programming language
ranks as one of the more complex undertakings that one could wish to undertake,
and most of what he talked about was way beyond my comprehension, but he had a
way of explaining issues in simple and direct terms that made it possible for
me to understand and appreciate what he was describing. Over the past few years
we have been talking over video link (iChat) on average twice a week for two or
three hours at a time.

Jack was an idealist. He was a fierce defender of the
underdog and he had a deep and angry contempt for those that he saw victimizing
others for their own gain. One of the most painful experiences of my life was
to watch Jack struggle with the health care system. He had the best health
insurance that money could buy, yet he recently estimated that fully one third
of his available time was spent dealing with the administrative maze he was
required to fight his way through. This is in addition to the time spent
actually receiving health care; doctor visits, checkups, tests and so on. And
always with the worry and stress of possibly losing his health care altogether
if he put a foot wrong. Yet with all of this on top of his actual health
issues, he had time and attention to worry about the plight of earthquake
victims in Japan and rebels in Libya and all of the people suffering in the
world.

Jack's enormous intellectual accomplishments took place
against a background of considerable personal turmoil. On many occasions we
talked about the fact that he had quite fortuitously had experiences that few
people undergo. He was born with a hormonal imbalance that had the effect of
dampening his experience of emotions. He described it as being something like
Mr Spock, coolly logical and somewhat perplexed by emotional responses in
others. At the age of 30 he started taking hormone replacement therapy, and was
suddenly dropped headlong into the world of the emotions. This was a very
courageous act, as it was, as he said, like being an emotional teenager in a
30-year old body. He had to learn from scratch along with all the other
challenges of his life, all the painful lessons we learn when we are blessedly
young. He did not lightly decide to go forward with this. He understood what it
would mean, and he was also aware that once he started he could never go back
to the way he was before. But Jack was never one to shrink from a challenge.
The immense benefit that this gave was a deep compassionate understanding of
both the logical, intellectual point of view and the non-rational emotional
point of view because he had experienced both, and because he was a deeply
self-examining person.

Another aspect that deeply colored Jack's life experience
was having lived for nearly a decade with a death sentence, and being reprieved
at the last moment. At the time he was diagnosed as HIV+ it was a fatal
disease. Sooner or later, probably in eight years or so, you would get sick and
die. Only it did not happen that way for Jack. When he did find himself in
hospital with pneumonia, and assumed he had days to live, his doctor told him
he was going to get a new combination of drugs that would keep him alive. One
might think that this would be pretty much unalloyed good news, but it carried
some major challenges. When you know you are going to die soon, you lead a
different kind of life, with different priorities than if you think you are
going to live a long life. You do not tend to make long-term provision for the
future, either materially or emotionally. The sudden discovery that he was
going to inhabit this body maybe for decades longer than he thought, with all
of the worries and responsibilities involved in living in today's world, and
absolutely dependent on an uninterrupted supply of very expensive medications
was a rose with very sharp thorns. I am not, of course, saying that Jack
regretted staying alive or wished he had died, but the last years of Jack's
life were beset with some very dark moments, when the manifold challenges he
faced seemed insuperable. Yet always he would bounce back. The last time I
talked to him, less than a week before he died, he told me how excited he was
at the prospect of working on the Prograph for Haiku project again, and how he
had new ideas he wanted to try out. No matter what challenges he faced in his
personal life, he never stopped caring about the things that were important to
him.

It may seem like an odd description for Jack, but in my eyes
he was a true Southern gentleman. He was courteous and considerate. When he
felt he had acted hurtfully, his apology was genuine and complete. When you
visited him, he was actively hospitable, offering whatever he had to offer. I
believe that the key to Jack's strength of character, the bedrock on which he
stood was his family. He often talked to me about his childhood and teenage
years. You can imagine that a person such as Jack was not a very good fit in a
South that is still not exactly a bastion of tolerance. Nonetheless, he told
me, his parents never wavered in their support for him. They stood up for him
when he incurred the wrath of church or school. They completely accepted him
and loved him. It was probably the greatest conflict of his life that he felt
that he had to live in San Francisco to fit in with society at large, yet that
meant sacrificing being close to his family. He was keenly aware of the fact
that they would much prefer that he lived close to them, but still completely
supported him in his decision. He blamed himself for causing them pain.

I cannot begin to contemplate the hole Jack is going to
leave in my life. He has been a deeply embedded part of the fabric of my
existence for a very long time. In a very large area of my life he was the
first person I would turn to for help, or to share a new discovery. But I am
also aware that my grief and sadness are for me, not for Jack. I am the one who
is bereft, who bears the loss. If there is any consolation to be had at such a
time, it is in the thought that Jack is finally at peace. His struggle is over.
He dealt with challenges in his life that no one person should have to bear,
and he acquitted himself with grace and courage. He faced his demons squarely
and, if he did not always defeat them, he never himself conceded defeat. He
has, by his example, taught me much about life, and I am deeply grateful to
have had the privilege of calling him my friend. He has earned his rest.